I'm teaching a number of workshops at Metrix this winter that some of you might find interesting. Here's the schedule:

Intro to Arduino covers the basics of using the Arduino. It covers setup, introductory programming, and simple interface circuits. Cost is $70 and includes an Arduino and all materials. Each student needs to bring a laptop. It will be offered on the following days:

Mobile Sensors will cover the basics of the most popular types of sensors used in mobile and wearable applications: force, position, light, temperature, tilt, compasses, and more. These types of sensors can enable you to build things from an automatic night light to arobot capable of navigating through a room on its own. The Arduino platform will provide a handy tool for recording, analyzing, presenting, and acting on the sensor output. Finally, each student will have the opportunity to build a sensor-enabled device with the Arduino platform.

Digital Communications with Arduino delves into expanding the capabilities of your Arduino by using the built-in communications ports to talk to various kinds of peripherals! We will be exploring common communications types including I2C, SPI, serial, and shift registers. Students will receive an Arduino shield with examples of peripherals that use each communication type. Students need to bring an Arduino-compatible board and a laptop. Students should be familiar with the material in Intro to Arduino. Cost is $100.

I finally got around to porting the Zigduino files over to the Arduino-1.5.7 IDE... and it is wonderful.

Instead of being somewhat painful to install like the previous versions, it's just a zip file that you unpack in to the $SKETCHBOOK/hardware directory and restart the IDE. The Arduino-1.5.7 IDE also uses a current avr-gcc toolchain, so no mucking around with that either. I've pulled the ZigduinoRadio library into the distribution as well, so the new process is as follows:

Steven programmed a gorgeous multi-color bouncing ball interaction with the aliasing tricks to increase the apparent resolution. This is one of the nicer video clips I've seen -- shooting things that glow is difficult to do well and Steven did a nice job here.

Charles put together a neat little printable 3D snap-action clip that makes it really easy to connect backpacks together to build arrays of LED matrices. You can find the model on TinkerCAD.

We're sponsoring Seattle Mini MakerFaire this year. We're very pleased that it will be in the EMP Museum this year, which is a fantastic space. Please make sure to come see our booth on the third floor. We will have the Zigduino-based robots back from last year plus other cool stuff.

I recently managed to build a non-inverting amplifier with an op amp that acted as an inverting amplifier. I found this more than a little puzzling, and asked around for possible causes. My friends were kind enough not to laugh too much when they pointed out my error.

The problem was that the op amp I had selected, the TL974, has a rather tight common mode voltage spec. It expects the common mode input voltage to be more than a volt from each power rail. The common mode voltage is the average of the two input voltages. Since those voltages are equal (or nearly so) in the non-inverting configuration, we can assume that the common mode voltage is equal to the input voltage.

The input voltages on my circuit ranged from 0-1.8V against power rails of 0V and 3.8V. Not surprisingly, this didn't work very well; it caused the inverting and non-inverting inputs to swap places. As a result, instead of amplifying the input voltage across the intended gain of two, it shifted the signal up 1.8V and inverted it. Wheeee!

Arachnid Labs has come out with circuit pattern trading cards. Most electrical circuits are composed from a relatively small number of common patterns that can be designed and analyzed as units. The engineer can then compose these individual sub-circuits into a completed device.

Arachnid Labs took this and produced a set of 32 trading cards that illustrate some of the most common ones. Once you recognize these patterns, you will begin to see them in every schematic you see.

If you haven't visited our website in a while, you may notice that it looks much different. That's because we've re-designed it and switched from Google Checkout over to Stripe for handling credit cards and the like. It doesn't require your credit card to be attached to your Google account in order to use it, which should help some of our institutional customers.

We've tried to duplicate as many links from the old website as made sense. Please poke around and see if we've missed anything important.

It's that time of year again -- time for Maker Faire Bay Area! We'll be sharing a booth with the Metrix Open Hardware Alliance, which is a coalition of several Seattle-area open source hardware companies, including OpenBeam USA, organized by our friends at Metrix Create:Space. We'll be in booth 514, in the southeast quadrant of the Expo Hall.

The second is a paper presented at IMECS 2013 about using Zigduinos andContiki to build loosely coupled wireless sensor networks. They are working with a middleware layer for building sensor networks called LooCI and evaluating how the Zigduino behaves with it.